Feeble Imitations
by onlytomriddle
Summary: Once real beauty dies, there's no way to get it back in full. You just have to settle for memories or reenactments. Remember when Johnny got beat up by Devi? That was beauty, according to NNY. Let's hear it in his own words.


**Author's Note:** Hey, check it out. I just now wrote this pretty much nonstop on inspiration. It's just a really long monologue from Johnny's thoughts. It was inspired by this one line in "Here to Stay," by KoRn. "So I take my face and bash it into a mirror! I won't have to see the pain! Pain! Pain! This state is elevating as the hurt turns into hating..." Then I remembered how poor NNY got bashed into a mirror in Issue 2. This takes place sometime between #3 and #4, because the Doughboys are still around. Enjoy reading.

**Disclaimer:** I do not own Johnny, the Doughboys, Devi, the Wall, drunk homophobes, or Jell-O. I don't know who actually owns Jell-O, but I'm sure you know who owns the others.

swish

I remember very distinctly that wonderful floating feeling I had when I was getting my ass kicked. I wasn't being beaten up by drunk homophobes on a dare this time... It was special. This time I had thrown the first punch. I wasn't just walking along the street with my favorite song stuck in my head when some shitheads decided to... That's another story. This is supposed to be a happy remembrance! Happy! I was getting beaten up and I was happy! Maybe I didn't realize it at the time, but when I got out of my coma I was mad as hell because someone had come close to silencing me but failed. Like when I was a kid and I had a nice dream, and then woke up on the floor with no blankets and blood on my hands. Pretty funny how that turns out. Or maybe it didn't turn out that way... Am I making that part up? I don't know, it just came to my mind and I assumed I was the little kid in the vision... Maybe it was Squee. But why would he have blood on his hands? Anyway, uh... Devi. When she was defending herself from my dogma (if that's the right word), she proved me just how wrong I was on the matter. Beauty cannot last forever; there can only be feeble imitations after the real thing has died. I was mistaking the memory of happiness for the real thing. One might think, that with happiness and beauty being so rare in the world, that they are merely products of imagination. I can see that being true. How can I really be sure of what I remember of the incident to be what really happened in this reality? I'm starting to sound like Psycho-Doughboy. Better than Mr. Fuck, though. He has no mercy for me. He wants me to persevere... He wouldn't mind if I never shut up! At least D-Boy wants to shut up himself.

I'm going to try to get that floaty feeling again. The Doughboys are too light to help (probably because they're leaning so much fucking weight on my mind!), and Devi wouldn't want to help me. She would probably like for me to be gone for good, but she's not a killer. She knows what she's doing. She knows what she's feeling, and could probably have some success in supressing those feelings if she tried. I would say I'm madly jealous, but I'm trying to practice now. It's not working. Nothing works. Fuck. See, I'm feeling frustration right now. That's why I will attempt to counter it with more feeling. No, this can work. When I gave up my attempts to drown the sad loneliness in an iceberg (there's a better metaphor for that somewhere), the pain of the mirror smashing on contact with my skull kind of did it for me. After that, the emotional pain was replaced by easily-managed physical pain. Emotions will twist, contort, and grow to suicidal proportions when left unchecked, but physical pain goes away when the body is done healing itself. Hence, the ephemeral floating feeling. When I left the coma the iceberg melted and I was positively boiling with disappointment. If I had been able to think, I would have been thinking that I was dead and would never have to feel again. Then I woke up...

So I'm going to try again. Now I'm walking into what would be my bedroom (if it had a bed in it) with the mirror. The mirror still has all its shards within a three-foot radius. I can see how my head must have bent the top part down somehow. I haven't been in this room since I woke up and left to soothe my needy post-comatose stomach sack with glut and another murder. That sounded pretty wordy, didn't it? But stepping into this room is like stepping into a dream... That dream I keep having, actually, when the goddamn Sleep Devil manages to make me blink long enough. It's a good dream, though. Instead of leaving me twitching and not bleeding to death, she had continued for almost all eternity, stopping only when I was an unkickable puddle of crumbly gelatin. My powdered bones would make the puddle all jiggly like gelatin, because I've heard of what they do with all those cow bones. I should try that on a test subject. No, no time for that. If my present plan works, I won't even care to share my new jelly invention with Squee. I'm sure he would like it, though. But it would take a very long time to powder a skeleton with only a big hammer, and that's not even counting the several hours it would take to clean it out first. And I wouldn't even eat any. Why would I eat the Jell-o of my enemies? It would have to be cooked, too, and I forget where the stove is. If I didn't like Devi so much I might be able to stand one tiny bite... Goddamnit! That's cannibalism! I don't eat people! I hate people! That's just like drinking their fucking piss! Why did I even start thinking about that? Goddamnit! Now I'm laughing again. Psycho-Doughboy must be distracted from me. Probably talking to the Wall or something, plotting new ways to get me to kill myself. Well I'm going to beat them to it! And this mirror will help.

I remember mentioning some floaty feeling a few minutes ago, and I don't know what the hell that was about. Now I'm picking up one of the dusty shards of glass. Ow. I didn't think it would betray me like that. Piece of shit glass shard! Then again, it does look an awful lot like the knife sitting in the umbrella vase over there. I almost jerked my hand up to my mouth to suck out the pain like a little child who scraped the heel of his palm on sandy blacktop, but I stopped just in time. It's physical pain! I haven't seen my own blood for some time. Why does it look like everyone else's blood? There's a little less of it than there should be, but then again... Yes, I can feel now that my hand is freezing cold! I never notice these things. Good! Now that I'm noticing things, I have that first feeling down. Now, to position myself correctly in front of the mirror. There, that's about right. According to the dream, I was standing about here before she slammed my head into the mirror. I'm not sure how I fell down after that, or how she punched me before I hit the glass, but I know she did a few times. She might have, yeah, she kicked me first. Fuck, I wish we had never noticed each other in the book store. A girl as wonderful as Devi should never have to deal with someone like me, even once.

I can see part of my shirt in the mirror. Is that mud? How did I get mud on my shirt? No, wait, no. It's blood. Must have been there a while. Hmm. There's not a lot of glass left on the wood.

Now I'm gluing each shard back onto the wood so that I can smash into it again. Hey, it's starting to look like Devi. It's a mosaic! I'm making art again! There's one of her boots. She had nice boots, kind of like slippers. They weren't clunky hooves, like mine. There's one of her legs. Half of her torso. Hey, that piece could be hair. Where's a little piece? She needs a nose. I wish she were here to see this! She would be so freaked out, she would have to beat me up again! I just have to settle with her memory. I can't find any head-shaped pieces. Should I go so detailed as to make her hood? No, somehow this has to be mediocre. If I like it too much, I won't want to ruin it with my face. My face does not deserved to be blessed with genuine beauty like hers. I think that's why she left. But that doesn't matter, because she's going to kill me today. Such fun, doom is for me.

Wait a second. I can't die just from slamming my face into a mirror. I know from experience, people do not die from a smack in the face. Maybe I can settle for something less than death itself. Whatever I get from it, it should do something for my pain.

swish

**Author's Note:** Wasn't that neat? Now review! I tried as hard as I could to keep NNY in character, and I think even El Squezz would be impressed! Or at least creeped out.


End file.
